"It's a demanding treasure hunt": the odyssey of those affected by the FGC service interruption between Gràcia and Sarrià due to works
Although the alternative service is working normally, the journey is longer than usual
BarcelonaThe closure for renovation works between the Sarrià and Gràcia stations of Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC) on the Barcelona-Vallès line is testing users' patience. Trains have not been running on this section since Tuesday and will not resume until August 23rd. As an alternative, a special bus service has been established connecting the two stations and covering the usual route, with stops at Sant Gervasi, Muntaner, La Bonanova, Les Tres Torres, and Sarrià.
However, this alternative service quadruples the usual journey time: if the Sarrià-Gràcia section normally takes five minutes, it now exceeds twenty. "People get on and off the bus, and the journey takes much longer," lamented Belén this Thursday, who comes from Sabadell and was unaware of the service change. "Today I'm arriving at work at least half an hour late," she adds.
Trains on lines S1 and S2 running between Sarrià and Terrassa Nacions Unides and Sarrià and Sabadell Parc del Nord maintain their usual schedules. However, trains running between Gràcia and Catalunya stations operate with modified schedules, with a maximum frequency of eighteen trains per hour per direction. In addition to this structural delay, taking the shuttle buses has become an ordeal due to the high temperatures, both in the morning and in the afternoon.
Silvia, 27 weeks pregnant and traveling from Rubí on line S1, recounts that her journey on Tuesday was a "tough and demanding obstacle course." Although her morning journey was "smooth," she found that the train stations had no cooling system and it was "hellishly hot." During the return journey home in the afternoon, however, she encountered "a queue of at least fifty people" upon arriving at Gal·la Placídia, where the bus stop connecting to Sarrià is located. "I gave up," says Silvia. Until the works are finished, she will take the train for the first part of the journey and then take her car to complete the route now covered by bus, as she has a parking spot in Gràcia.
Half an hour's wait to get on the bus
Maria had a similar experience. "I had to queue for half an hour, and suffer a lot of heat, because there weren't enough buses to transport the passengers coming from Plaça Catalunya," she explains. In fact, even though it's the middle of August, the service has been so saturated that coaches and buses have been hired from private companies to cope with the volume of passengers on the FGC.
Nevertheless, FGC operators assure that since Wednesday the service "has been running without many queues and normally". Despite this, traffic variations and queues at peak hours to catch the bus continue to complicate and lengthen the journey for most users.
"We have to have a little patience," admits Carmen, who is on her third day of making this journey. "We can't complain if they are fixing the tracks," she adds. Josep, from Provença station, also downplays the inconvenience: he says it "seems logical" to him that the works are being done in August, when there are fewer people in the city, even if it means "getting up a little earlier".